When I started this site, and this blog, my intention was (and is) to give foreigners coming to or recently arrived in China an inside look at the country. Of course, usually this means “from an expat perspective”. Well, Ben Ross, of Ben’s Blog, has taken this a step further: “As an American living in …Read More
Here’s a cool idea: Tear up the gray concrete of Tiananmen Square and turn it into a Chinese version of New York’s Central Park. One leading architect is suggesting something along those lines, the Guardian reports (via CDT): Ma Yansong, an award-winning urban planner, says the grey concrete symbol of China’s red politics should be …Read More
A couple of weeks ago I saw something that I’ve been trying to make sense of ever since. Here’s what happened: I was on a bus here in Suzhou, which drew up to a set of traffic lights at an intersection. To my right, on the corner of the road, I noticed on old woman …Read More
Ah, May Holiday – one of China’s shimmering Golden Week vacations. Just a quick little reminder what awaits any laowai silly enough to venture outside and catch up on travel next week. 1.view full post for image 2.view full post for image 3.Read More
Anyone who’s lived in China for more than a couple weeks has likely amassed a pile of pirated DVDs. Coming from Western countries where the prices are 15-30x more, it’s tough to throw even the worst ones away (I’ve still got my copy of Benchwarmers for Christ’s sake). Getting them home is one of the …Read More
This is just going to be a few sentences long, but I was hoping people would check out the Manchurian Candidate’s website: www.kyle.cn It has a very interesting list of all the school killings that China has had (reported) since 2004. If you think the US is violent, check this list out.Read More
As most everyone with Internet, cable, a radio or a newspaper knows by now – there was a terrible shooting at Virginia Tech University yesterday where a man shot and killed 32 people, injuring 15 others. What’s quickly coming to light is that the killer was very likely a 25-year-old Chinese man in the US …Read More
The big news in China the past couple weeks has been about Western fast food chains (McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut) underpaying their staff in China – particularly the part-timers. The issue was sparked by accusations from China’s top trade union that McDonald’s was underpaying their employees (Reuters/China Daily), in some places by almost half, …Read More
An ex-pat can expect to field a great variety of questions in their host country, and here in China the questions follow a similar pattern of curiosity. Random characters that we run into every day – taxi-drivers, shop-assistants, etc. – tend to ask the most banal questions, such as “can you use chopsticks?†and “where …Read More
I’m not a timid man. Generally speaking I don’t get overtly nervous in most situations. However, any time I see the financial protection services folk, clad in their somewhat comical blue combats, and armed with a tube of a gun, I get shaky. These guys, whose job it is to protect transfers of money between …Read More
I was just reading Yale Professor Robert Schiller’s article Thrifty China, Spendthrift America, which explains the apparent discrepancy of the saving rate in America versus what’s occuring in China. While I cannot provide as indepth an economic analysis as the learned professor has made, I would like to touch upon some of the points he …Read More
Living in China brings with it a number of occasions where most can do nothing but scratch their heads and say “WTF?” However, largely by the help of the English-language China blogsphere, we’ve started to create a dictionary that can assist in putting words to the weird, definitions to the disarray and captions to the …Read More
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